Although much of my research focuses on legal aspects of undocumented migration, I’d never visited a detention centre for irregular migrants. So when the opportunity arose in May this year to see inside the Otay Mesa detention facility near San Diego (where a Russian citizen had died just days before), I couldn’t pass it by.

The first thing that strikes the observer is how far the facility is located from downtown San Diego. Indeed, it’s very close to the Mexican border. Having finally arrived after more than an hour’s drive, and after going through a double electrified fence and registration, we are conducted into a room where we are given a presentation by CCA personnel. CCA — the Correction Corporation of America — is a private company making huge profits on running such centres ($227 million in 2015). With some notable exceptions, scholars have neglected the business aspects of the migration industry, perhaps due to the opaque nature of some of the arrangements between governments and companies working in the sector. Yet these aspects raise innumerable questions as to whether one can reconcile the profit-seeking interests of shareholders in such companies with human rights, as well as to what extent legislation might be influenced by powerful lobbies interested in perpetuating the detention cycle. (more…)

In a recent article, published in the inter-disciplinary journal Law, Culture, and Humanities, I have argued that a surge in number of cases of cancellation of British citizenship indicates a return to a loyalty-protection model of citizenship which was popular earlier during the two World Wars. Here, I will go further, and say that Brexit and the debates of exclusion of EEA nationals from the UK, are also influenced by the very same loyalty-protection view. The loyalty-protection view had become unfashionable in the aftermath of the Second World War but is now back in vogue. (more…)